By Kelly O'Connell ——Bio and Archives--April 11, 2011
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He is not operating on the same plane as ordinary politicians. . . . the agent of transformation in an age of revolution, as a figure uniquely qualified to open the door to the 21st century.--Gary HartUK politico Neil Kinnock recalls Vice President Biden as saying: I remember Joe saying it was going to be Barack Obama up against John McCain. He said; 'You can put money on it - Obama's a genius'. I said; 'What kind of genius? Like who?' He said, 'Well, there isn't one person I could compare him to, but he's like a cross between Denzel Washington and Franklin Roosevelt." And then there was MSNBC's Chris Matthew's immortally verbalized man-crush:
It's part of reporting this case, this election, the feeling most people get when they hear Barack Obama's speech. My, I felt this thrill going up my leg. I mean, I don't have that too often.--Chris MatthewsMatthews also made this humdinger of a statement in his book Life's a Campaign, talking about Obama's 2004 speech at the Democratic convention. He stated,
There, in Boston's FleetCenter, he delivered what might have been the most inspiring speech many Americans listening that evening had ever heard. Obama, at that moment not elected to the U.S. Senate, was offering a miraculous gift with those words. With thoughtful eloquence, Obama was marrying the immigrant story to the African American legacy not simply by his genes, but by his genius. No wonder the country's youth turned to him as their hope as well as their hero.And who could forget this show-stopper by presidential historian Michael Beschloss while a guest on the Don Imus show:
Michael Beschloss: Yeah. Even aside from the fact of electing the first African American President and whatever one's partisan views this is a guy whose IQ is off the charts--I mean you cannot say that he is anything but a very serious and capable leader and--you know--You and I have talked about this for years ...From the foreign press, Denmark's Politiken:
Imus: Well. What is his IQ?
Beschloss: ... our system doesn't allow those people to become President, those people meaning people THAT smart and THAT capable
Imus: What is his IQ?
Beschloss: Pardon?
Imus: What is his IQ?
Beschloss: Uh. I would say it's probably - he's probably the smartest guy ever to become President.
Imus: That's not what I asked you. I asked you what his IQ was.
Beschloss: You know that I don't know and I'd have to find someone with more expertise ...
Imus: You don't know.
Beschloss: What do YOU think it is?
Imus: I don't know...
He comes from humble beginnings and defends the weak and vulnerable, because he can identify himself with their conditions. And no we are not thinking of Jesus Christ, whose birthday has just been celebrated--but rather the President of the United States Barack Hussein Obama. On the other hand, we have Jesus' miracles that everyone still remembers, but which only benefited a few...Obama is, of course, greater than Jesus...This last example, one of tens of thousands of panegyrics laid at Obama's feet in his early presidency, may be the most embarrassing, by Newsweek's Evan Thomas:
Obama's had, really, a different task We're seen too often as the bad guys. And he--he has a very different job from--Reagan was all about America, and you talked about it. Obama is ‘we are above that now.' We're not just parochial, we're not just chauvinistic, we're not just provincial. We stand for something--I mean in a way Obama's standing above the country, above--above the world, he's sort of God.
I hate what's happening to the country...What we're doing is unbelievable. If you look at what's going on, where our jobs are disappearing to foreign countries...You're going paying 7 or 8 dollars a gallon for your oil soon. I blame a lot (on Obama). It's been a terrible presidency... What's going on with this country, the way we're spending money like drunken sailors, we are just absolutely...going to destroy our own freedom... If there is a shutdown, I think it would be a tremendously negative mark on the president of the United States. He's the one who has to get people together. I'm a deal man. I've made hundreds and hundreds of deals and transactions. He's never done deals before...How's he going to corral all these people?...You don't have the right leader... I think Obamacare is a total disaster...This country is going to hell.
What the Frankfurt School essentially does is draw on both Marx and Freud in the 1930s to create this theory called Critical Theory. The term is ingenious because you're tempted to ask, "What is the theory?" The theory is to criticize. The theory is that the way to bring down Western culture and the capitalist order is not to lay down an alternative. They explicitly refuse to do that. They say it can't be done, that we can't imagine what a free society would look like (their definition of a free society). As long as we're living under repression--the repression of a capitalistic economic order which creates (in their theory) the Freudian condition, the conditions that Freud describes in individuals of repression--we can't even imagine it. What Critical Theory is about is simply criticizing. It calls for the most destructive criticism possible, in every possible way, designed to bring the current order down.The old computing model was GIGO, Garbage In, Garbage Out. This saying might best describe what has happened to the minds of America's brightest and most accomplished persons. For example, if you teach a young child the only moral economic system is socialism, will they later be motivated to develop a sophisticated view of capitalism? Since the Ivy League is now regularly marinated in Political Correctness, we should understand this cripples the development of serious intellect thought, or independent thinking, so crucial to developing a mature world-view.
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Kelly O’Connell is an author and attorney. He was born on the West Coast, raised in Las Vegas, and matriculated from the University of Oregon. After laboring for the Reformed Church in Galway, Ireland, he returned to America and attended law school in Virginia, where he earned a JD and a Master’s degree in Government. He spent a stint working as a researcher and writer of academic articles at a Miami law school, focusing on ancient law and society. He has also been employed as a university Speech & Debate professor. He then returned West and worked as an assistant district attorney. Kelly is now is a private practitioner with a small law practice in New Mexico.